ts in view, these illustrious thinkers
urged in the interests of the truth the obliteration of anything like
a wish, a tendency, or a personal attachment. The great reproach of
the preachers of the seventeenth century against the libertines was
that they had embraced their desires and had adopted irreligious
opinions because they wished them to be true.

In this great struggle between my reason and my beliefs I was careful
to avoid a single reasoning from abstract philosophy. The method of
natural and physical sciences which at Issy had imposed itself upon me
as an absolute law led me to distrust all system. I was never stopped
by any objection with regard to the dogmas of the Trinity and the
Incarnation regarded in themselves. These dogmas, occurring in the
metaphysical ether did not shock any opposite opinion in me. Nothing
that was open to criticism in the policy and tendency of the Church,
either in the past or the present, made the slightest impression upon
me. If I could have believed that theology and the Bible were true,
none of the doctrines which were afterwards embodied in the _Syllabus_
and which were thereupon more or less promulgated, would have given me
any trouble. My reasons were entirely of a philological and critical
order; not in the least of a metaphysical, political, or moral kind.
These orders of ideas seemed scarcely tangible or capable of being
applied in any sense. But the question as to whether there are
contradictions between the Fourth Gospel and the synoptics is
one which there can be no difficulty in grasping. I can see these
contradictions with such absolute clearness that I would stake my
life, and, consequently, my eternal salvation, upon their reality
without a moment's hesitation. In a question of this kind there can
be none of those subterfuges which involve all moral and political
opinions in so much doubt. I do not admire either Philip II. or Pius
V., but if I had no material reasons for disbelieving the Catholic
creed, the atrocities of the former and the faggots of the latter
would not be obstacles to my faith.

Many eminent minds have on various occasions hinted to me that I
should never have broken away from Catholicism if I had not formed so
narrow a view of it; or if, to put it in another way, my teachers
had not given me this narrow view of it. Some people hold St.
Sulpice partially responsible for my incredulity, and reproach that
establishment upon the one hand with havi